• Nem Talált Eredményt

7.2 THE GROWING IMPORTANCE OF NON-COGNITIVE SKILLS IN JOB SEARCH AND AT WORK

N/A
N/A
Protected

Academic year: 2022

Ossza meg "7.2 THE GROWING IMPORTANCE OF NON-COGNITIVE SKILLS IN JOB SEARCH AND AT WORK"

Copied!
3
0
0

Teljes szövegt

(1)

Károly FazeKas

134

7.2 THE GROWING IMPORTANCE OF NON-COGNITIVE SKILLS IN JOB SEARCH AND AT WORK

Károly Fazekas

It is not only the sectoral and occupational structure of the economy that changes during technological development and transformation of the interna- tional, regional and social division of labour. There is a substantial shift in the task content within an occupation, in terms of what skills are required to ac- complish them. Over the past decades the share of jobs requiring mathematical and social skills has seen the fastest increase, while the share of jobs requiring neither mathematical nor social skills has declined the most (Deming, 2017).

Social (non-cognitive) skills are primarily needed for effective cooperation with others at work. They include the elements of the skill group termed Big Five in personality psychology: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, openness. They also include the theory of mind, which is the ability to place oneself in another’s position when observing others, to understand the reasons for other people’s actions and judge their state of mind from the viewpoint of our goals and actions. The theory of mind ca- pacity is highly important for the success of cooperation with another person and within a group in both education and the labour market (DeAngelo–Mc- Cannon, 2015).1

The increasing importance of non-cognitive skills observed in the past dec- ades are due to closely related technological, social and demographic reasons.

As a result of technological development (robotization, the spread of produc- tion and service systems consisting of continuously communicating elements and the expanding use of artificial intelligence) an increasing proportion of tasks requiring high-level cognitive skills can be performed by intelligent, com- puter-controlled equipment. By contrast, the expansion of robotisation has so far not taken place in occupations requiring non-cognitive skills (Deming–

Kahn, 2018). At the same time, the proportion of these occupations in the labour market has been steadily increasing partly due to an increase in the share of employees in the service sector and partly due to the increasing share of nursing and healthcare jobs, and also because tasks requiring group work, trust, intuition and social skills play an increasingly important role in mod- ern business management (Schanzenbach et al, 2016).

Some traditional occupations and jobs will likely disappear, even within a few years, but new jobs and occupations may emerge in the meantime and demand for labour in certain occupations, primarily those requiring non-cog- nitive skills, is continuously growing. For a long time it seemed that artificial intelligence is not capable of acquiring or learning non-cognitive skills. How- ever, there has also been significant progress in this field recently. According

1 Previous volumes of The Hungarian Labour Market have covered the definition and measuring of cognitive and non-cognitive skills in more detail (Fazekas, 2018a, 2018b).

(2)

7.2 The growing imporTance of non-cogniTive...

135 to forecasts based on results of the most recent developments, robots with non-cognitive skills will increasingly be able to undertake the necessary tasks in a wide range of personal services, nursing, elderly care, healthcare, trade and the creative industries (Morgan et al, 2019).

Considering the expansion of robotization, it is essential that young peo- ple possess the motivation and abilities necessary for learning the latest skills.

Furthermore, it will be necessary to undertake continuous analysis to reveal changes in the content of occupations in a labour market and support teach- ers and educational policy makers in adapting to changes by developing cur- ricula and methodology (Alabdulkareem et al, 2018).

Although the majority of non-cognitive skills are linked to hereditary traits, several empirical studies report that parents, the environment and school are able to develop or modify them to a large extent (Zhou, 2016). Methods aimed at developing non-cognitive skills (such as project-based groupwork) are increasingly utilised in educational systems all over the world.2 Several non-cognitive skills may also be developed in later life, in adult education or on-the-job training (Hoeschler et al, 2018, Hoeschler–Backes-Gellner, 2018).3

Analysis of job advertisements and recruitment practices shows that the level of non-cognitive skills is a significant predictor of successful job search (Hoeschler–Backes-Gellner, 2018). This is supported by impact assessments re- porting that programmes for the integration of inactive youth are more suc- cessful if they also include the development of non-cognitive skills (Guerra et al, 2014).4 Numerous examples show that at companies which included the development of non-cognitive skills in their in-company training, in- vestment into training yielded significant productivity gains (Adhvaryu et al, 2017, Groh et al, 2012).

In addition to skills development, it is important that employees and em- ployers possess relevant information about their skill levels and the yield of these skills. This information both strengthens the motivation of employees to improve their skills and increases the willingness of employers to reward high-level non-cognitive skills (Bassi–Nansamba, 2019).

References

Adhvaryu A.–Kala, N.–Nyshadham, A. (2018): The Skills to Pay the Bills: Returns to On-the-job Soft Skills Training. NBER Working Paper, No. 24313.

Alabdulkareem A.–Frank, M. R.–Sun L.–AlShebli, B.–Hidalgo, C.–Rahwan, I.

(2018): Unpacking the polarization of workplace skills. Science Advances, Vol. 4.

No. 7.

Bassi, V.–Nansamba, A. (2019): Screening and Signaling Non-Cognitive Skills. UCS- INET Research Paper No. 19-08.

DeAngelo, G.–McCannon, B. C. (2015): Theory of Mind Predicts Cooperative Behav- ior. West Virginia University College of Business and Economics, Working Paper Series, No. 16–16.

Deming, D. (2017): The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 132. No. 4. pp. 1593–1640.

2 The PISA assessment by the OECD and STEP by the World Bank have contained items as- sessing the non-cognitive skills of pupils since 2012 (Kautz et al, 2017, Gaelle et al, 2014).

3 Guerra et al (2014), based on the PR ACTICE model developed by the World Bank specifically for improving non- cognitive skills needed by the labour market, describe what methods are best suited for developing these skills in dif- ferent age groups.

4 For example: Job Corps, Youth Build and Big Brothers Big Sis- ters in the United States or EPIDE (Etablissments pour l’Insertion dans l’Emploi) in France (Quintini, 2015).

(3)

Károly FazeKas

136

Deming, D.–Kahn, L. B. (2018): Skill requirements across firms and labor markets:

Evidence from job postings for professionals. Journal of Labor Economics, Vol. 36.

pp. S337–S369.

Fazekas, K. (2018a): What are the tendencies in demand? The appreciation of non-cog- nitive skills. In: Fazekas, K.–Köllő, J. (eds.): The Hungarian labour market, 2017. In- stitute of Economics, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Hungarian Acad- emy of Sciences, Budapest, pp. 149–157.

Fazekas, K. (2018b): The impact of the increasing significance of non-cognitive skills on the labour market situation of women. In: Fazekas, K.–Szabó-Morvai, Á (eds.):

The Hungarian labour market, 2018. Institute of Economics, Centre for Econom- ic and Regional Studies, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, pp. 122–129.

Gaelle, P.–Sanchez Puerta, M. L.–Valerio, A.–Rajadel, T. (2014): STEP Skills Measurement Surveys. Innovative Tools for Assessing Skills. Social Protection and Labor, Discussion Paper, No. 1421. World Bank Group, Washington, DC.

Groh, M.–Krishnan, N.–McKenzie, D. J.–Vishwanath, T. (2012): Soft skills or hard cash? The Impact of Training and Wage Subsidy Programs on Female Youth Employ- ment in Jordan. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper, No. 6141.

Guerra, N.–Modecki, K.–Cunningham, W. (2014): Developing Social-Emotional Skills for the Labor Market: The PRACTICE Model. World Bank, Social Protec- tion and Labor Global Practice Group. Policy Research Working Paper, No. 7123.

Hoeschler, P.–Backes-Gellner, U. (2018): The Relative Importance of Personal Char- acteristics for the Hiring of Young Workers. Economics of Education Working Paper Series, No. 142. University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW).

Hoeschler, P.–Balestra, S.–Backes-Gellner, U. (2018): The Development of non- cognitive skills in adolescence. Economics Letters, Vol. 163. pp. 40–45.

Kautz, T.–Heckman, J. J.–Diris, R.–Weel, B.–Borghans, L. (2017): Fostering and Measuring Skills: Improving Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Skills to Promote Life- time Success. NBER Working Paper, No. 20749.

Morgan, F. R.–Autor, D.–Bessen, J. E.–Brynjolfsson, E.–Cebrian, M.–Deming, D.

J.–Feldman, M.–Groh, M.–Lobo, J.–Moro, E.–Wang, D.–Youn, H.–Rahwan, I.

(2019): Toward understanding the impact of artificial intelligence on labor. Proceed- ings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 116. No. 14. 6531–6539.

Quintini, G. (2015): Enhancing the non-cognitive skills of disconnected youth. OECD, Skills and Work. November 26.

Schanzenbach, D. W.–Nunn, R.–Bauer, L.–Mumford, M.–Breitwieser, A. (2016):

Seven Facts on Noncognitive Skills from Education to the Labor Market. The Hamilton Project.

Zhou, K. (2016): Non-cognitive skills: Definitions, measurement and malleability.

UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report. ED/GEMR/MRT/2016/P1/5.

Hivatkozások

KAPCSOLÓDÓ DOKUMENTUMOK

METHODS: Six neuropsychological functions were examined in order to test the cognitive status of the patient before and after the 2-month cognitive training:

In all three semantic fluency tests (animal, food item, and action), the same three temporal parameters (number of silent pauses, average length of silent pauses, average

Part of the project ’Developing Diagnostic Assessments: Exploration of Options for the Diagnostic Assessment of Further Cognitive and Affective Skills and Competences' Preparing

To review the most important experimental methods and paradigms of cognitive psychology in the topics of perception, attention, cognitive control, learning,

In Section 2 a detailed description of the correspondence analysis method will be presented, in Section 3 the steps of determining the importance of the technical skills of

Electronic communications provide the bearing digital infrastructure for the digitalized content services and applications, whereby the convergence process has been

They often examine the labour market impact of only one non-cognitive skill and ignore the interac- tions between individual skills as well as the reciprocal influence of cognitive

The importance of the developed tool lies in the fact that – in the case of non- banking group financial enterprises – it presents a stop-gap monitoring model based on balance